Music reviews: Rory Faithfield’s Songs for Sooner and Erland & The Carnival

Folk music in very different clothes:

• This year’s Port Fairy Folk Festival was embracing and inspirational (should I learn guitar?) but only one artist matched my sensibilities enough to prompt a CD purchase. On Songs for Sooner, singer-songwriter Rory Faithfield reveals himself as an earnest folk-rock artist in the vein of Luka Bloom, possessing a gift for lyric-laden songs. Although a handful of ordinary tunes ill suit Faithfield’s frail voice, ‘Big Blue Western Sky’ deserves hit status. 3 stars
• Take a folk singer, Erland Cooper, with a mellifluous 60s-tinged voice, mix trad folk songs with Cooper’s sterling self-penned tunes, and rope in multi-instrumentalist Simon Tong (The Verve) to construct stomping, post-modern arrangements, and you get a minor miracle, namely Erland And The Carnival. This skewed band’s self-titled debut roars with triumphant, catchy, weighty songs, with not a dud track to be heard. Folk-rock but not folk-rock . . . one of the year’s standout releases. 4½ stars